Re: The case for cross-desktop dockability and notification-area applet ideology revision.

[Curtis Hovey <sinzui cox net>]

On Sun, 2004-08-01 at 17:51 +0300, Juha Siltala wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 03:39:37PM +0000, Alastair Poole wrote:
> 
> > GNOME is becoming a usable desktop.
> 
> Yeah, right. :)
> 
> > I have noticed there are applications to which a visual window-list indicator 
> > is unnecessary.  Such include Gnome's Gaim.  And when enabled to function 
> > with the notification-area applet, the window-list becomes more readable and 
> > hence the desktop as a whole more usable.  
> 
> Now, what should be tray'ed and what shouldn't? The Windows system tray is
> horrible, because all commercial apps want to "just be there", just to
> remind you that they're around. This is not what we want. The notification
> area should be for apps that might actually have something to notify you
> about. Like Gaim, Xchat (hint, hint), news aggregators like Straw, etc.

What a coincidence.  I just posted a gripe about the gaim applet on
another thread.  I can see it is running from the window list and
window selector, but it never tells me about what is happening to my
connections and conversations.

A notification applet must say something about the state of function or
content, not whether it is running.

Rhythmbox tells me what is playing and provides some quick controls to
change it.

EggCUPS tells me when something is printing.

RHN notification tell me if updates are available.

A smart mail applet would show me how many new messages are in my Evo
Inbox Outbox.

A nice sharing applet would tell me how many uploads and downloads are
occurring

If you want the window list to take up less space as the Gaim applet,
then it should be modified to show only icon.  However, all the items
listed above are providing app state, _not_ document state.  I would not
use an icon only view of the window list, because most of my windows are
documents and I need to know there title to quickly select them.  So the
value of a notifcation area is for non-windowed apps, or apps that do
not need window focus to work.


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sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.